Hindy’s mother laughed. “Believe me, when I married Tatty, he was planning to learn only for a year or two. It was only our joint decision about what we wanted to do together — what we felt was worth sacrificing for. It didn’t come from any high school class or peer pressure. We chose to sacrifice for Torah because that’s how we felt together.”
Hindy heard her mother’s words well; it was the mantra she had drummed into her in high school. “To only marry the learning guy who went to the right yeshiva” was a value, but it definitely did not apply to every person in every situation.
“Hindy, I just don’t want to see you judging people on how they look on the outside,” her mother said. “I’m sure you are uncomfortable when people judge you that way. People aren’t lists. They are people.”
Hindy looked down in shame. The revelation dawned on her like an angel of truth whispering in her ear: She really had been judging Aryeh based on a superficial “checklist.” She thought of him now, with that pretty, pretty girl, and sadly realized that she’d missed her chance.
The revelation had come a few hours too late.
The party was in full swing, and all of Daniel’s friends moved on to the dining room. Rachel sat in the den beside Daniel, watching him drink one shot of whiskey after another. Frisch challenged him to see who would pass out first; Daniel insisted he could hold his liquor better than Frisch, hands down.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” Rachel asked after he’d had six shots.
“No, love.” He slurred his words and flopped his arm over Rachel where she sat. “Why don’t you come over here for a kiss?!”
Rachel flushed and stood up to leave the room.
Frisch laughed, nearly falling out of his seat. “The only reason she’s yours is because you knew I wanted her!”
Rachel froze and then turned to face the two men.
Wine comes in, secrets come out.
“Is that true, Daniel?”
Daniel laughed and grabbed hold of Rachel’s wrist.
“Let me go,” she insisted.
Daniel fixed her with a glazed stare. “Soon I will possess you, Rachel,” he whispered in her ear. “In every way.”
Rachel shook her hand free from him. “You are drunk, Daniel. I’m leaving.” She tried to move toward the door, but Daniel lurched up and blocked her.
“Daniel, please. Don’t do anything you will regret later.”
“I have no regrets, Rachel. I just don’t understand why you have to make it so hard for me all the time. I have to prove myself to you always.”
Frisch got up, stood beside Daniel, and chuckled. “She knows how to play the game, Daniel.”
Rachel wiped tears from her eyes. “That’s it? It’s just a game, and Rachel Shine is just another chess piece? Something to win?”
Frisch and Daniel looked at each other and burst into laughter.
“You got that right!” Frisch guffawed.
Rachel pushed through the men to grab her red shearling coat and bag.
“Let me take you home, Rachel,” Daniel slurred.
“No. You’re drunk. I’m not getting into a car with you. I’m calling a cab.”
Frisch snickered. “She is a spicy one, that Rachel.”
“Don’t look at my girl — loser,” Daniel snarled.
Rachel ran out of the house and into the driveway.
Daniel ran after her. “I
said
I would take you home! Get in the car!” he demanded, pointing imperiously at his convertible.
“No.” She shook her head. “Get away from me!”
Daniel grabbed her arm and pulled her toward his Porsche. “I said, get in the damn car!”
“Get off me!” She struggled to free herself, but Daniel was stronger. He pinned her to the car.
“So that’s it. I’m never good enough for you. You can’t even take a ride from me?” He staggered but quickly regained his hold.
“Daniel, let me go. You aren’t making sense. You’re drunk,” Rachel said.
“I’m not drunk,” he shouted. “You just don’t like me. You like my money, my diploma; you like this big freaking house! But you don’t like
me
.” Some friends looked out the window to see what the ruckus was about, but sensing it was a couple’s spat, they looked away.
“You’re right, Daniel!” Rachel’s tears poured copiously down her cheeks. “That’s all true!”
“Get in the damn car!” he yelled. He shoved her in, locking the door. She tried to fumble with the lock, but he was faster. He vaulted into the driver’s seat and took off just as she swung her door open. With a screech of tires, he revved the motor from zero to a hundred in seconds.
“Daniel! Stop the car!” She slammed her door closed.
But he wouldn’t hear what she had to say. He drove like a man possessed.
“Daniel, slow down. This isn’t safe!” she pleaded.
But what she wanted was not important.
She realized too late that it had never been.
He drove seventy miles an hour down the thruway to Brooklyn, only narrowly missing head-on collisions as he sped.
Rachel cowered in terror; she believed she was going to die. In this car. With this man. Who did not behave like a man at all. Rachel cried. There was nobody to hear her, nobody to help her. She was with the man who was supposed to be her life partner, but for all intents and purposes, she was alone. “God, please get me out of this alive!” she prayed and recited Psalms she knew by heart.
Daniel took the exit into Brooklyn, but instead of slowing down in the city streets, he sped up. Running a red light off of Kings Plaza, drunken Daniel Gold sideswiped one car, then collided with another.
The collision seemed to occur in slow motion; Rachel felt a presence wrap around her. A warm layer surrounded her, enveloping her body, cocooning her from the crushing impact of the screeching, crashing cars.
God help me!
were her last thoughts before her head hit the dashboard.
• • •
Murad and Valentine Zohar had long gone to bed when the phone rang.
Jacob picked up the phone as he stood in the kitchen washing the dishes left from that evening’s Purim meal.
“Is this the Zohar residence?”
Jacob cleared his throat. “It is. May I help you?”
“This is Dr. Fischer calling from Maimonides Medical Hospital. We have a patient who was brought in to the emergency room, unconscious. Serious car accident. She has no I.D. The only thing we found on her was this number in her coat pocket. Could you come down here and identify this patient?”
Jacob’s mind raced as he tried to picture who might have his number, but he drew a blank.
Thank God Ilana is reading in the den — but what other girl would have my number?
“What does she look like?”
“She’s Caucasian, young, early twenties maybe; other than that, she’s in pretty bad shape, so I can’t say. Why don’t you come down here and help us identify her, call her family.”
“I’ll be right over.”
• • •
Jacob entered the emergency room, which teemed with crying children and groaning adults. But it was the patients who made no sound at all that Jacob found the most frightening. The smell of blood and infection mixed with disinfectant gave the hospital its own particular odor, and Jacob wondered why he was there. From the reception desk, Jacob was directed to Dr. Fischer, a tall man with a buzz haircut and a jutting nose that gave him the appearance of an eagle.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Zohar. I’ll take you to the mystery woman.” Dr. Fischer walked through the hallway with Jacob toward a female who was lying as though she was asleep. Through the bandages and bruises, he knew right away it was Rachel Shine. Still on an ER gurney, she looked small and pale. His heart ached.
Dr. Fischer flipped through Rachel’s chart, which was attached to the metal gurney. “She should have been killed,” he remarked. “From the description the EMTs gave of the crash site, it’s a miracle she’s still alive.”
“What about her fiancé?” Jacob gazed tenderly at Rachel, his heart full of prayers.
“I don’t know what you mean. The ambulance only brought in this girl.”
“Nobody was with her? Nobody at all?” Jacob pressed.
“If there was, I wouldn’t have had to call you, now would I?” Dr. Fischer excused himself to tend to the next patient.
“I’m praying for you, Rachel,” Jacob whispered to her, leaving her only to use the phone to track down her family and friends.
• • •
Hindy was on a date. Suri Kaufman had set her up with her friend’s son, and she sat near him on a bench in Central Park. It was a cold, cloudy March day, and Ephraim Moscowitz was repeating a lecture he’d heard that week. Ephraim was studying for the rabbinate at Yeshiva University, and Hindy realized right away that they spoke completely different languages.
In her high heels and angora sweater, she felt incongruous sitting in a park. Ephraim wore the unofficial Y.U. uniform of khaki chinos, striped shirt, and round glasses. He too was a bit overweight — the typical look of a boy who sat over his Talmud all day, munching on cheese doodles and doughnuts, too involved to pay attention to what he was eating.
He was pleasant enough, but Hindy couldn’t imagine him fitting in with her family and community, where the boys wore the official uniforms of the Brooklyn yeshivas: white shirt, black slacks, and black hat, mandatory from age thirteen on.
She remembered her mother’s advice not to categorize, but it was difficult. She tried to concentrate on what Ephraim was saying, but his approach to the Torah was too different.
“We’ve been learning about dinosaurs in Genesis,” the boy said.
“Dinosaurs? There’s no such thing.”
Ephraim laughed. “Well, of course not now, but from the Triassic period until the Cretaceous period, sixty-five million years ago — ”
Hindy interrupted. “What are you saying, sixty-five million years ago? Everybody knows that God made the world in six days — only five thousand years ago!”
Ephraim nodded. “I suppose you could take that perspective, that the world was created
aged,
but there’s much evidence to support the physical age of the universe with a different interpretation of God’s time — which, in fact, does correlate when one balances physics with the Talmud.”
“Huh?”
Ephraim continued, “But my rabbi is just the coolest guy — ”
Give him a chance.
“Cool? You call your rabbi ‘cool’? Isn’t that disrespectful?”
“Why would that be disrespectful — he
is
cool.”
Give him a chance.
Hindy slowly exhaled.
“Anyway,” the boy continued, “when I was surfing in Hawaii this past summer, I thought about what my rabbi had said — ”
Hindy stared at Ephraim. “You went surfing in Hawaii?”
“Oh, yeah — it was awesome. When I was navigating a massive wave — I really felt God’s presence.”
“Oh,” Hindy said and pulled some lint off her angora sweater.
Ephraim pushed his glasses further up on his nose. “And it all became crystal clear to me.”
“What did?” Hindy asked.
“Everything!” the boy said, “God, surfing, dinosaurs, literature, Torah, applied mathematics — ”
“What are you talking about?” Hindy nodded, trying to remain polite.
The boy shook his head. “Everything is a united whole!”
“Okay,” Hindy said and glanced at her watch.
“I suppose what I’m saying is that, in the context of arguing with God about what we perceive as difficulties — ”
“Who’s arguing?” Hindy said.
“Mankind!”
Hindy stared at him.
Ephraim paused. “I apologize, that remark was insensitive. Humankind!”
“Humankind?”
“Yes.”
Hindy waited for Ephraim to continue, but he just sat on the park bench, looking at her.
After what felt like a very long time, Ephraim finally spoke. “Well, what are your thoughts on the subject?”
“What subject?”
“Humankind’s struggle with God,” Ephraim said slowly, as if speaking to a small child.
“Why is this important?” Hindy asked.
Ephraim’s cheeks reddened. “Well, how else could a religious man of faith connect to God?”
“You just do it,” Hindy said. She was used to living her life a certain way because that’s how her family had always lived. She didn’t need to question or analyze — or struggle — with God. She accepted His rules and made the best of it.
Ephraim cleared his throat. “So you are agreeing, then, with the sentiments of Seneca as quoted in Epistles, ‘Live among men as if God beheld you; speak to God as if men were listening.’”
Hindy scratched her nose.
Then the boy threw in a comparison to Nietzsche and comments from Shakespeare, and Hindy wondered if he had lost his mind. She knew of Shakespeare — she’d had to read some plays in high school — but she could not imagine what an English playwright had to do with the Torah.
Ephraim was trying to explain that in his worldview, all beauty had Truth, which could enhance the Torah, and vice versa. “You know that song by U2, where they sing about how they still haven’t found what they’re looking for? Isn’t that awesome? It’s like man’s search to connect to God.”
Hindy was horrified. This boy sat and learned? “How could you listen to rock and roll music and study to be a rabbi? It’s
treif
!”
“Well, actually, in context … ”
Ephraim droned on and on, and Hindy didn’t understand what he was talking about. He was a sweet boy, but she could not imagine what Suri had been thinking when she’d set them up. Yes, he learned the Torah, and Hindy wanted a “learning boy.” But this wasn’t what she’d meant at all. She truly wanted someone more like — like Suri’s son — like Aryeh Kaufman. Besides his handsome looks and intelligence, Aryeh was full of integrity and could easily fit in to her family in terms of his values. He even wore a black hat like her father. What surprised her, though, was how she loved how Aryeh made her feel about herself when she was with him. She felt kind, smart, relaxed, secure — and beautiful — whenever they spent time together. It dawned on Hindy that she loved being with Aryeh Kaufman, and she wondered why she was out with Ephraim Moscowitz.
They chatted politely for an hour or so, and then Ephraim stood up. “It was nice meeting you, Hindy. So maybe I’ll call you.”